'The Waterworks'

Reviewed by SIMON SCHAMA

Published: June 19, 1994

"The fact that Henry Armstrong was buried did not seem to him to prove that he was dead: he had always been a hard man to convince." Thus begins "One Summer Night," one of Ambrose Bierce's most wicked short stories: two pages long, a coffin-side view of an exhumation. An exhumation also plays an important part in E. L. Doctorow's startling and spellbinding new novel, "The Waterworks." But what Mr. Doctorow has truly exhumed are the remains of the 19th-century genre of the science-detection mystery, originated by Poe and richly developed by Bierce and Wilkie Collins.

This is not to say that "The Waterworks" is mere Gotham Gothic. As Mr. Doctorow makes his narrator, a newspaper editor named McIlvaine, insist, this is no ghost story. For although he uses all the classic devices of the genre -- a body that refuses to stay dead, an incredulous storyteller sucked into the Perilous Pursuit of Truth, an omniscient, laconic and socially awkward policeman -- his book is actually designed to be a heavyweight novel of ideas, an allegory of vitality, mortality and the manipulation of nature. It is as though, descending at La Guardia Airport, he saw the welcome mat of the cemeteries in Queens, extending all the way to the horizon of towers, and wanted to have the populations of the dead and the living mingle in one vast literary commotion.

Almost all of Mr. Doctorow's novels have been, to some degree, documents of New York history, and one of his greatest strengths has been the richness of his descriptions of its cultural landscape, from turn-of-the-century New Rochelle and Manhattan in "Ragtime" to the Jewish Bronx of his 1930's childhood in "World's Fair." But in "The Waterworks," New York is no longer a setting for the action: it is the action, the principal character, the presiding genius and the trap of history.

Ostensibly, Mr. Doctorow lands the reader in Boss Tweed's city in 1871, at the precise moment the Tweed Ring is about to fall apart. New York is a gravy-stained, spit-flecked, bituminous, rough-necked, livid place that we fall into in his pages, and if this sounds familiar, it should. For although the odors are coal-sulfur and horse manure rather than pretzel scorch and subterranean steam, Mr. Doctorow's post-bellum Gehenna is plainly held up as a mirror in which we are meant to see our own time and manners. And more than is usually the case with Mr. Doctorow, this is not a pretty picture.

Of the Ring, McIlvaine editorializes, "They were nothing if not absurd -- ridiculous, simple-minded, stupid, self-aggrandizing. And murderous. All the qualities of men who prevail in our Republic." This New York of then and now and ever is a place imprisoned in thuggish corruption, where the police conspire with, rather than against, crime; a lair of vampire capitalism, a warren of alleys crawling with the urchin "street rats" who subsist on the refuse of the city's wants and needs, darting beneath the wheels of indifferent carriages, vending the news, loitering at the edge of scummy saloons.

MR. DOCTOROW has caught this vision of a gaslight necropolis, where distinctions between the living and the dead are blurred by the presence of so many species of dead-and-alive souls, with forensic precision. His New York is also a residence of the mutilated. In one stunning episode, the artist Harry Wheelwright, possibly the most memorable of the characters in the novel, is seen painting the torso of a Civil War veteran, horribly deformed by the wounds of battle. Appropriately, then, Mr. Doctorow also gives his narrator, McIlvaine, a mutilated diction, broken by elisions and compressions of thought and utterance. This positions him to value the aggregating skills of the police officer, Donne, since "enlightenment comes . . . in bits and pieces of humdrum reality, each adding its mosaic bit of glitter to the eventual vision."

The self-conscious choice of a broken style will not please those for whom the pleasure principle has always been a major reason to read Mr. Doctorow, whether dancing to the lilt of his deceptive jauntiness in "Ragtime" or enfolded in the lyric intensity of "The Book of Daniel." But it is of a piece with his other courageous formal reinventions. Just as he was able to concoct a kind of peculiarly furtive flatness for the voice of the title character of "Billy Bathgate," he has produced an extraordinarily fretful, glance-over-the-shoulder writing style for McIlvaine, the purveyor of easy commonplaces.

The understated edginess of the writing serves the intensity of the story very well, as if it were overheard or glimpsed rather than seen dead on. One of McIlvaine's freelance culture reviewers, Martin Pemberton, habitually dressed in an ancient Union Army greatcoat and roiling in righteous misanthropic rage against the vulgar iniquities of the Gilded Age, announces to the editor that he has glimpsed his father, whom the world believes dead and buried, riding in a white municipal omnibus together with a company of spectral old men.